Wednesday, February 27, 2013

I know a Sugarman.

Photograph courtesy of a very tall man.

A performance by Rodriguez last week thoroughly warmed the cockles of my heart. By song number two, tears were rolling down my cheeks. Around us people young and old sang along. A man behind me yelled: you can do anything - we love you man!

Exactly.

Because, you see, it wasn't just an old man
singing his songs.

It was my eight-year-old self playing with the family hound, a grumpy daschund, outside my brother's bedroom window, listening to Cold Fact.

It was my eighteen-year-old self, leaving home, taping that vinyl record to take with me to university. On the other side of Moondance.

It was my nineteen-year-old self posing my boyfriend cross-legged in a hat and a purple vest, for Photography 101.
(He told me I looked fat
in my favourite cheesecloth dress)

It was countless parties and barbeques and trips
in a car.

It was hours of sulking on my bed.

It was wondering, wondering... is there someone who will understand me, is he listening too?

In this job I do, I have built up a network of people and many have become loved ones. I visited a couple yesterday, both in their late seventies. They own a small antique shop and often help me to find the things that I need. Now and then I am invited to their beautiful home - a large stone house next to the sea, with very high ceilings. It is filled with two lifetimes of collecting.

They have recently lost a good friend - a young artist. His self-portrait is on display in the living room and music spills through the house. Was it a huntsman or a player that made you pay the cost...

Rodriguez again. She has her own memories - we were driving to the coast and playing this song, we were laughing so much. And then she winks at me and says: oh that man - he has such a sexy voice - ahhhhh!

Firstly, Cheesecloth dress. My oh my. That brings back memories. Four years at varsity with all sorts of cheesecloth dresses. Try and explain that whole idea to my student daughter.But.... she found Mr Sugerman and she loves his music.Life goes in circles.I love your stories.

Appropos of the movie - Searching for Sugarman - there was an in-depth story on the local public radio here, WNYC, or maybe it was NPR (broadcast nationallY) about the phenomenon of his popularity in South Africa, and just about nowhere else...

Then one evening there were no leftovers. I went to the grocery store. The sales clerk said artichokes are out of season. This is not San Diego. Still I dreamt of her, dipped in lemony butter, scraped carefully with teeth and sucked, the pale cream flesh, the tender flower, her skirt held like a cup, each sip bringing me closer to the moon, the vegetable pearl of her insides where the heart fans out fibrous hairs and waits a last mouthful of her green world.

Nin Andrews(1958-)

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

Virginia Wolf

(1882-1941)

Never love anybody who treats you like you're ordinary.

Oscar Wilde

(1854-1900)

You could tend a garden at night, only at night, pouring dark water onto leaves, and into the earth, like pouring midnight onto midnight. You could hold your soil-stained hands up to the moon. The stars would gleam on the bottom of the shovel. It would smell the same as a daytime garden - it would smell green, violet, red, white. But come back, in daylight. Come back, to see the colours without closing your eyes.- Sean Michaels. Accompaniment to the song "Immune" by LOW. Said the Gramophone

"The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody's fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.

Katherine Mansfield

(1888-1923)

"It's important to begin a search on a full stomach."Henry Bromel, Northern Exposure, The Big Kiss, 1991

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It's an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence,like a love affair you can nevertalk about.For a while after, you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you've been and what's happened. In the end, you're just happy you were there - with your eyes wide open - and lived to see it.Anthony Bourdain (1956-), from The Nasty Bits.

"You say the sentence or you write the sentence again and again until the tuning fork is still." - Martin Amis (1949-)

"People like me write because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate. Our articulation is our writing." – William Trevor (1928-)

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to." Jim Jarmusch (1953- )

"A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals." John Steinbeck (1902-1968)

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you smelled and saw nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought that Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) - from A Moveable Feast.

"Men are climbing to the Moon, but they don't seem interested in the beating human heart."Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962), in a letter to a friend, one year before her death.

"The barbaric gleams right under the surface of all human skin."Jorie Graham (1950-)

S u b s c r i b e

"The real director of our life is Accident - a director full of cruelty, compassion and bewitching charm."Pascal Mercier (1944-)

"Talking of pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my mouth a nectarine - how good, how fine. It went down all pulpy, slushy, oozy, all it's delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large, beatified strawberry ."John Keats (1795-1821)

"Words are only painted fire, a book is the fire itself."Mark Twain (1835-1910)

"I'm what you might describe as the classic underachiever. I tread that fine line between boffin-dom and the grand amateur."Andrew Weatherall (1963-)

"The flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds, his heart of hearts that the picturesdostop."Saul Bellow (1915-2005) from Ravelstein